NEW YORK CITY, May 28—“Our safety will never come through ethnic cleansing. It will never come through apartheid” said the president of the Jewish Law Students Association of the City University of New York (CUNY) to a militant rally of 300 students and faculty in front of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. This rally comes on the heels of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) racist terror-bombing of Gaza, which killed more than 275 people (one-third of them children) and displaced tens of thousands. (SEE CHALLENGE editorial from 6/9)John Jay was targeted because its criminal justice program collaborates with the NYPD and the IDF, and protestors demanded that CUNY cut all ties with Israel.  
One speaker pointed out that some faculty are former members of the IDF, and some Fulbright scholars are current IDF. A City College speaker told of several instances of discrimination against Palestinian students and a John Jay student connected the racist oppression of Palestinians to the racist terror faced by Black people in the U.S.  
Anti-imperialist union resolution adds momentum
Following the demonstration, on June 10, the delegate assembly of the 29,000-member Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the faculty and staff union at CUNY, passed a resolution calling Israel an apartheid state, calling on chapters to discuss support for “Boycott Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS), and demanding that the Biden administration end all funding of the occupation of Palestine.
The original resolution was co-sponsored by the PSC’s Anti-Racist Committee, the Academic Freedom Committee and the International Committee, where PL’ers have been active for years. A watered-down replacement resolution was introduced by the new PSC Executive Council, but delegates fought back with a series of amendments to restore most of the content of the original. Every proposed amendment passed, and the final resolution passed, 84-34, with the four principal officers voting against it.
Anti-imperialism vs liberalism, nationalism, and identity politics
While the student rally and PSC resolution were antiracist and anti-imperialist, only the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) calls for the unity of Arab and Jewish workers against ALL the bosses to smash capitalism: whether
Israeli, Hamas or the Palestinian Authority. PLP organizes the international working class for communism against all forms of capitalism. Nationalism is a capitalist idea and as long as this remains the main ideology leading the anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist movement, any new nation that arises will be ruled by capitalists. Is this the “liberation” that Palestinian and working-class Jewish masses really yearn for — capitalist oppressors “who look like me”?
Few other places in the world feel the defeat of the old communist movement more acutely than in the imperialist war-torn Middle East. It is among the regions where a new international communist movement is most urgently needed, from Palestine to Yemen. The old communist movement made many errors, including maintaining the wage system and promoting nationalism. Nationalism has never led to real workers’ liberation and, as PLP has analyzed elsewhere, was one of the driving forces that led to the reversal of the great Soviet and Chinese revolutions.
Pandemic winds down; fightback contagion spreads
PLP is organizing among students, faculty and staff who are angry at the CUNY administration and the politicians behind them. Protests followed at Hunter College High School, Borough of Manhattan Community College and City College against racist cutbacks, austerity budgets and racist entrance exams. At Kingsborough Community College, students and antiracist faculty have waged a years-long struggle to expose and remove a racist Zionist KCC administrator following racist public social media posts and link this fight to KCC’s racist treatment of its majority Black and immigrant students and campus workers.
The Zionists responded by attacking any faculty they could think of, from intimidation through childish threats invoking the fascist terrorist Jewish Defense League, to ongoing lawsuits, to hilarious op-eds in local newspapers attacking PLP and calling out CHALLENGE (NY Daily News, 2/13/19). Despite spooking some fake left revisionist and pro-Palestinian nationalist faculty who cowed to individualism and anti-communism under pressure, the struggle continues connecting KCC’s protection of fascist Michael Goldstein to CUNY’s racist ties with Israel and racist attacks on students and adjunct faculty. Our growing relationships with students, campus workers and militant antiracist faculty has strengthened despite the pandemic and our forces are preparing to broaden anti-imperialist fightback this fall. As the bosses gear up to recruit our students for the next imperialist World War III , they’ll be contending with a growing and battle hardened PLP on campuses from Brooklyn to the Bronx.
Organize a student strike, plant seeds for communist future
This rally and resolution against CUNY complicity with imperialist terror will help our growing movement expose the role of the university under capitalism to churn out workers and soldiers. Our tasks this fall include connecting these anti-imperialist and communist politics to the mass movement for a CUNY student strike for free tuition and rehiring the thousands of adjuncts who were fired during the pandemic.
Nationalism may be the color of the protests today, but the blood of our children is red the whole world over, and only communism is worthy of those we mourn! It’s not a “free” Palestinian nation we have to win, it’s a communist world. Join the fight for communist revolution! JOIN PLP!

The following is an excerpted graduation speech delivered by a communist high school student to their graduating class of 2021.

I am gonna begin this speech just like every other high school senior who is speaking at graduation by congulating us for persevering through the past 16 months of adversity.
I know I can speak for everyone when I say that it has been difficult to stay motivated and confident through online learning, constant worry of sickness, and crowded households. But with the continuous support of our teachers and classmates, we persevered!
We are here today because of all the hard work we have done through one of the most unconventional and difficult high school experiences in history.
But the truth is, our celebration goes far beyond making it through the past 16 months of covid.
As students in a predominantly Black and Latin school in a racist education system, our high school adversity started four years ago. We have undergone four years of oppressive metal detectors, four years of being told “put your metal items in your bag,” four years of being treated like criminals. Despite the DOE [Department of Education] trying to infect our brains with the false idea that we are not meant to succeed, we’ve fought and won. Our diplomas are our trophies. We are all here proving them wrong.  
However, today we are not celebrating enduring racism, we are celebrating fighting racism.
In ninth grade, we entered a community that had spent years building an antiracist and multiracial environment. We saw that and we flourished.
We recognized the DOE’s purposeful separation between all the schools within our building and created and joined campus council to help ease tensions. We spoke with students at the mainly-white high school and realized that we are more alike than we are different. Campus council has held multiple successful school wide game nights, movie nights, and parties. We fought and we won.
We observed the disparity between the sports teams, what the mainly-white school in the building had access to versus what we had access to. Students, teachers, and faculty united and worked to get us more sports teams. We fought and we won.
We continued to fight to merge the sports teams with ours to build comradery and unbeatable teams. This year, PSAL [Public Schools Athletic League] could no longer ignore the continuous calls for change and combined the sports teams. We fought and we won.
And just like we won our fight for an integrated building, we will win our fight against metal detectors. Today, we celebrate the combined sports teams, and in the future, the graduating seniors will give speeches celebrating the removal of the metal detectors.
The platform that we’ve been given to speak up for ourselves and fight against inequity is only possible from the foundation built by the students before us. We have successfully continued the work of our predecessors to help enable the victories of our successors. We have done our work to ensure that the school we are leaving today is a better, stronger, and more resilient school than it was when we entered.
We’ve created unforgettable memories that we, and the faculty here will cherish for the rest of our lives. And while I’m sad that I cannot sit here and reminisce about prom or our senior trip, we had four years worth of fun in the just two and a half years we had in the building.
So here’s to every joke made in spanish class, every picket line outside of the building, every nail biting basketball game that had us on our feet, every laugh, tear, and every schoolwide gathering in the auditorium where we got to cheer for our friends while they did some embarrassing performance for vocal class.
My high school has shaped us into the amazing students, friends, and antiracists that we are today.
It is now our job to take what we learned, both academically and politically, into the next chapter of our lives. Every college that we occupy deserves to hear the echoes of our school slogan the second we step on campus: “An injustice to one is an injustice to all.”
As a senior class, we’ve fought, we’ve won, and we will never stop fighting.

 As this is being written, another wave of Covid-19 is hitting the working class in Haiti with ferocity. Under “normal” conditions of imperialist-imposed misery, there is little or no health care. In the capital city, there is one public hospital—understaffed, under-resourced and underfunded—for about three million people. In most departments (states), the situation is the same. For the majority of workers, there is nowhere to go, so they are ill and dying at home, unnoticed except by their loved ones. Needless to say, private hospitals, while only moderately better, are off-limits to workers.
 The imperialist countries have yet to provide any vaccines against Covid-19 to Haiti, and when and if they do, what little can be expected will be “reserved” for the rulers and their allies who will push their way to the front of the line. Haiti is the only country in the western hemisphere that has yet to issue a shot of any COVID-19 vaccines (Bloomberg, 6/8). The racism is self-evident.
The government, with its history of working with the imperialist bosses to bleed the working class dry, has failed in every way during this crisis. The bosses have zero credibility, so most people don’t know what to believe about the pandemic, or just about anything else. But the rumor mill is active and has disarmed our class. It has made workers wary of vaccines, or doubting that the pandemic is real. The media ignores the pandemic except when it affects the “hauts-gradés” (big shots), though as the illness spreads and the death toll mounts, workers will have no choice but to confront the situation.
While all the conditions of daily life for workers and students—urban and rural—are deteriorating, what is really needed, more than vaccines and all the other necessities of a decent life, is a revolutionary communist party with deep ties among the masses to arm workers with the ideology and organization to change the world. We are fighting for all of it: a decent life today and communism tomorrow. We can change the world. The Progressive Labor Party has a lot of work to do. We will make the difference.
Build PLP! Fight for communism! Power to the working class!

It’s already been a month since the workers’ blockades and marches here in Colombia. The national bosses have offered both the carrot and stick. They have managed to weaken the strike committees with the same strategy they used in 2019, buying time by offering negotiations but never really complying with workers’ demands.
Meanwhile, Colombia’s bosses have unleashed their war tactics: militarizing the country, criminalizing the blockades, infiltrating the marches, creating paramilitary groups that together with the military indiscriminately shoot at the marchers, robbing, destroying, and detaining hundreds of young people who appear in the Cauca River after they were reported as missing.
The defense minister faced charges in the national senate, but predictably he was acquitted. The Colombian bosses long resisted any visit of a human rights commission. The government of Big Fascist U.S. President Joe Biden, supports the Duque government as its most important ally in the region.
The government finally accepted the visit of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), who only served to minimize and justify the state violence. The result is a project for the restructuring of the police, job creation, education, health, and projects for young people. All this to try to calm things down.
The strike committee broke negotiations with the government, as a tactic to coincide with the arrival of the IACHR. We the workers again march in Bogotá, to put pressure on where the bosses are meeting.
But no international organization will ever turn against the capitalist class. It is only a distraction that will give the fascists in power time to justify their actions and prepare to attack our class again. Only the united working class empowered by the method of scientific analysis (dialectical materialism) can draw the best conclusions to act according to reality, being led by a mass Progressive Labor Party that interprets the needs and will of the masses.